This is usually dealt with by the court posting the documents to the respondent at their home address. The respondent will often have to file a form to acknowledge that they have received the papers.
What happens if I do not know the respondent’s address or he/she does not return the acknowledgment form to the court?
If you do not know where the respondent lives, we can arrange for a process server to locate him or her and serve their copy of the papers upon them personally. This also helps if they have not returned the acknowledgment form because the process server can provide evidence to the court that they have actually served the papers upon the respondent.
Sometimes we can ask the court to deem service. This means that there is evidence to show that the respondent has actually received the papers. For instance, they may have sent an email to you or we may have received a letter from solicitors instructed by the respondent which confirms that they have received the court papers.
What happens if we still cannot find the respondent?
Technology is now being used by the court when serving documents. You may not have the address of the respondent but you may have their email or telephone number. The court’s permission is required to serve papers in this way but it is now quite usual for court documents to be served by email. An application for a non-molestation/occupation order has to be served upon the respondent personally by a process server to ensure that they know the date of the hearing. If the respondent is avoiding service and their phone number is known then the process server can send a copy of the documents to them by text and the courts will usually accept this as confirmation that they have received the papers.
More recently, the court have allowed service of papers by way of WhatsApp messaging. This was agreed in the case of Gray v Hurley which was a cohabitation dispute. Numerous attempts had been made at personal service which had failed. By sending the court papers via a WhatsApp message, confirmation can be obtained that the recipient has opened the message because two blue ticks are shown next to the message. This could make it more preferable than sending by text or email which cannot give any guarantee that the recipient has actually read the messages. The request for a read receipt on an email can of course be declined.
The courts are taking the progress of technology seriously and the above case shows that with the increase in social media they are now starting to use this to their advantage.
